Conflict That Matters

 

By Mary Rosenblum

 

            Everybody knows that conflict is story.  The Main Character has a problem…a conflict…and he or she must try to overcome it, succeeding or failing in the end.  Clearly conflict is a central component of the story.  But what makes a strong conflict? 

 

Internal Versus External

            Let’s define conflict a bit more precisely here.  It is a problem that the Main Character needs to overcome.  But that problem can have its origins within the character or in external events.  For example, if a woman is faced with an aggressive stranger in a deserted parking garage late at night, this problem is an external conflict.  She must deal with this threatening outsider.  The situation arose through outside events.

 

            But let’s say that our main character is being devoured by jealousy of his older brother.  He has turned to alcohol to relieve that jealousy and his marriage is falling apart.  His problem is the jealousy he feels.  He must either find a way to deal with it or fail to deal with it and continue on a downward spiral.  This conflict, this problem, arises from within the character.  He is not facing an attacker, he is facing his own, internal feelings.  This is internal conflict. 

 

Big Versus Little

            Conflict comes in many ‘sizes’.  It can be a large, overwhelming conflict, such as an attacking lion or a charging enemy army.  It can be tiny and very intimate, such as a boy’s need to stand up to his overbearing father.  The relative size of the conflict does not determine its strength. The story about the boy who must stand up to his father may far outweigh the impact of the story where the main character must evade or defeat the attacking lion.  So if size doesn’t matter, what does? 

 

            The importance of the outcome to the reader determines the strength of your conflict.  If the reader cares a lot about what happens, your conflict is sufficiently strong.  If the reader doesn’t much care either way, your conflict is weak.  If your conflict is a character’s concern over whether she will get the job she is applying for or not, the reader may not care much either way.  We don’t know this woman, so what if she gets that secretary job?  How boring.    That lion attacking may be a much stronger conflict because the excitement of the attack, the vivid action, will hold our attention.   Now in both cases, we are looking at conflict alone, with characters we don’t know very well. 

 

Character Magnifies Conflict

            But let’s look again at our ‘tiny’ conflict of the job interview and our ‘big’ conflict of the attacking lion.  What if we create a powerful character in our job seeker.  She has met with blow after blow from life and has gallantly fought back . We like her.  She is admirable, but she is nearing the end of her reserves.  If she doesn’t get this job, she may finally give up, walk into the river and let her life insurance pay for her son’s future since she cannot.  The author creates a real character, her valiant struggles engage us, and we care about her.  Now that job interview matters a lot!  If she doesn’t get it, she may give up.  She has tried so hard, she deserves this job.  We readers are on the edges of our seats, rooting for her.  Now, this conflict is comparable to that of the man fighting off the lion.  We don’t have the exciting visuals, perhaps, but we have a real, three dimensional character that we care about who is fighting off failure. 

 

            Remember that creating a real, three dimensional character helps our story in many ways.  Cardboard characters don’t add much to your tale.  For help with character creation, take a look at;  Creating the Strong Character in Writing Craft: Character Development.

 

Upping the Ante

            If your conflict seems too weak to support your story, think about how to make it matter more to the reader.  Perhaps you need to make your character more real, so that his or her problem becomes more important to us readers.  Perhaps the external problem needs to be larger.  It’s not just a matter of getting detention for skipping school to help a friend…our Main Character might be sidelined from the basketball team and cost the school it’s victory at the state meet.   If your lion is attacking, take away that convenient tree, or stick the Main Character with an injured friend who cannot run from the threat. 

            The bottom line is:  what is at stake here?  If the answer is not much, then it’s not likely to have a strong impact on your readers.   See if you can’t increase that not much to a resounding a lot by increasing the cost to your character and making that character more realistic, so that the risk to him or her matters more to us readers.